EUROPE TAKES A DEEPER LOOK AT FREE/LIBRE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE...

It is being viewed as a "major research project" coming out of Europe, that takes a detailed look at the reasons behind the growing use of Free and Open Source software. One of the key persons behind this study is Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, who moved from the Indian capital of New Delhi to Europe just a couple of years ago.

Does Aiyer Ghosh see this report changing the way Free and Open Source software is seen? "Not necessarily," says he modestly. But then adds, almost as an after-thought: "But hopefully the study will increase the depth and clarity with which the phenomenon is understood."

Commentators have already called this study perhaps the "first large-scale rigorous study concerning any aspect of free software". It included interviewers with thousands of developers and hundreds of businesses.

Till a couple of years back, the 27-year-old Indian-born author of the study was based in Delhi, and closely involved in the Indian internet/telecom scene. He wrote for technical and mainstream publications too.

Ghosh had his own newsletter, 'Indian Techonomist', which went out to people like Reed Hundt and Vint Cerf, and he wrote various consultation papers on the opening up Internet policy (especially to small providers) on the request of senior Indian government officials.

Extracts from an exclusive interview Aiyer Ghosh <rishab at dxm dot org> had with Frederick Noronha <fred at bytesforall dot org>:

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: What was your contribution in preparing the report? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

I wrote the original proposal and workplan for the FLOSS study, and after approval from the EC (European Commission), was coordinator of the project consortium (University of Maastricht and Berlecon Research). I was lead author of the parts written at the university.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: How much time was put into it in all? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

FLOSS was a 13 month project. there were three people at the university and three at Berlecon Research working on it. But I off-hand can't give you a person-hours breakdown!

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: What was the most surprising finding/s? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

That's a hard question to answer. We weren't really surprised by our own findings, but from the user survey (Berlecon; final report part 1) the level of F/OSS use among organisations was higher than one might have expected (e.g. 6% of all companies use some F/OSS on the desktop).

An important, though expected, finding was that licence fees were #3 on the list of reasons for user organisations choosing F/OSS -- stability and security were more important.

In the developer survey (part 4) one interesting result was that despite the adoption of the term Open Source among most of the media and support structure (e.g. O'Reilly, Slashdot, Sourceforge) developers themselves identify themselves with the term free software by a huge margin.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: What are the aspects that are still to be researched on FLOSS, in your view? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

Much more work needs to be done on measuring organisation and production of the software itself (started in part 5 of the report); lots of analysis remains to be done on the data from the developer survey.

On the user side, due to a limited budget, FLOSS didn't ask organisations who said they don't use any F/OSS why they don't do so, which would have been interesting.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: This dilemma of explaianing why affluent Europe is increasing turning to FLOSS, how would you look at it? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't see that as a dilemma.

I can imagine that licence fee savings are an attraction in developing countries, but arguably the total cost of ownership isn't necessarily much lower for f/oss than for proprietary solutions.

Certainly, most advocacy in Europe emphasises other advantages rather than cost, which is a dubious advantage if it is one at all and easier to attack ("cheap" software must be bad...)

As the user survey showed, F/OSS is being adopted more for stability and security than price.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: Besides this study, what have you been busy with since moving out of India? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

i moved to Maastricht in October 2000, and the FLOSS proposal was submitted that month. I've been working mostly full-time with this study and related research, and speak frequently on the topic of free software and the "cooking-pot market" model I developed to explain non-monetary economic activity on the Internet. (Ghosh explains the 'cooking pot model' at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/ghosh/ )

I also continue my involvement as a founding editor of First Monday, the now very successful peer-reviewed Internet journal, and organised the first First Monday conference in Maastricht last year (www.infonomics.nl/newdefinitions/)

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: Do you see this report as changing the way FLOSS is seen? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

Not necessarily. But hopefully the study will increase the depth and clarity with which the phenomenon is understood.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: Could you tell us something about how you chose the word -- rather apt in my view -- FLOSS, to describe both Free Software and Open Source in one neat twist of phrase? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

European Commission projects often have long-winded titles and the official project acronym is therefore quite important.

Early drafts of the project proposal were entitled Free/Open Source User and Developer Study. FOSUDS sounded rather less catchy than FLOSS, which also had the additional advantage of incorporating "Libre Software", a term that is hardly in use outside the french-speaking members of the EC bureaucracy, which is a pity.

----------------------------------------------------------------------- FN: If you had a chance to do this study all over again, what would you have done differently? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't know, really, still digesting what we've just finished. But certainly we would have asked user organisations for reasons _not_ to use F/OSS...

See the report at http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/

For a photo of Aiyer Ghosh, please see http://www.infonomics.nl/niew/about/people_cv.php?id=81